Thursday, November 29, 2012

NASA is actually working on a faster than light warp drive, but it might blow up any planet it travels to

HandoutThe concept of warp travel on Star
Trek worked a lot like the Alcubierre drive, even if the engines
themselves are the wrong shape

Faster than light (FTL) travel has
always been a hallmark of science fiction, but buzz kill scientists
have always said the concept was impossible because it violates the
cardinal rule of Einstein’s relativity, namely that the very building
blocks of the universe mean that nothing can go faster than light.

Now NASA may have found a loophole, enabling them to travel to
distant stars that are several light years away, all without violating
relativity. The only problem? It might blow up whatever is waiting at
its destination.

Back in 1994, physicist Miguel Alcubierre came up with a novel way to get around the relativity problem: warping space-time.
He proposed a mechanism where a vehicle would move forward by
contracting space-time in front and expanding space-time behind. This
would be accomplished through placing a spheroid object within
specifically shaped concentric rings creating a space-time warp bubble.
This warp bubble would push the ship forward through the universe faster
than light while its relative speed remained zero.

Of course this process would take a tremendous amount of energy. The
reason scientists didn’t start building Alcubierre warp engines back in
1994 was that the theory also figured that huge amounts of energy would
be needed to power up the drive. Like the total mass energy of the
planet of Jupiter massive. So the Alccubierre drive was shelved as one
of those things that would remain theoretical.
However, a few months ago, physicist Harold White announced that his
team at NASA was working on an Alcubierre drive and that it would use
just a infinitesimal fraction of the energy earlier theorized. So what
changed? io9 interviewed White to explain the change.

“My early results suggested I had discovered something that was in
the math all along,” he told io9. “I suddenly realized that if you made
the thickness of the negative vacuum energy ring larger — like shifting
from a belt shape to a donut shape — and oscillate the warp bubble, you
can greatly reduce the energy required — perhaps making the idea
plausible.”

Essentially, White simply proposed shifting the shape of the rings
around the spheroid. This little change, White says, reduced the amount
of energy needed from the mass of Jupiter, to that of a traditional
rocket. Quite a feat.

Now, all of this is still theoretical at this point, so it might not
work exactly how NASA thinks it will or at all. And even if it does
work, the human race probably won’t be zipping around like the James T.
Kirk quite yet. There is the little detail that the Alcubierre drive
will probably destroy or at least irradiate anything at its target
destination. Universe Today explains:

Researchers from the University of Sydney have done some
advanced crunching of numbers regarding the effects of FTL space travel
via Alcubierre drive, taking into consideration the many types of cosmic
particles that would be encountered along the way. Space is not just an
empty void between point A and point B… rather, it’s full of particles
that have mass (as well as some that do not.) What the research team —
led by Brendan McMonigal, Geraint Lewis, and Philip O’Byrne — has found
is that these particles can get “swept up” into the warp bubble and
focused into regions before and behind the ship, as well as within the
warp bubble itself.
When the Alcubierre-driven ship decelerates from superluminal speed,
the particles its bubble has gathered are released in energetic
outbursts. In the case of forward-facing particles the outburst can be
very energetic — enough to destroy anyone at the destination directly in
front of the ship.

Now, this might be something that can be fixed by stopping early or
slightly off from the destination in question, or it might be something
that makes the whole engine unworkable. The real issue lies in the fact
that there is no theoretical limit to how much energy could be stored
this way. Basically, if the Alubierre ship travels far enough it could
accumulate enough energy to blow up whole planets or even more. And the
energy would be released in all directions, making safe parking more
than a little dicey.

Thoughts of exploding planets are a touch premature though. ”I’m not
ready to discuss much beyond the math and very controlled modest
approaches in the lab,” White told io9. That said, this is FTL travel
seems 100% more possible now than before NASA started this program.